Sierra Entertainment

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Sierra Entertainment was a computer game developer and publisher active from 1980 to 2004. The name survives as a brand of Vivendi Universal.

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History

Image:Sierra.png Image:Sierra kenwilliams.jpg

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The beginning

On-Line Systems, as Sierra Entertainment was originally named, was established in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams in their suburban Los Angeles, California home. Inspired by a text-based game written at MIT called Adventure, the husband and wife team began to think up new ways to expand upon that basic idea.

"I don't think we thought at the time about actually starting a software company...but it did cross my mind. 'It would be fun to try and write something like that...so I wrote up a design at the proverbial kitchen table...I drew all kinds of pictures," said Roberta.

Using a borrowed TRS-80 machine, the Williamses began to look through most of the games available at the time. Many were good, but none were able to offer more than textual descriptions of what was going on inside the game. Roberta began work on an idea for a game that would join text and pictures for the first time. It took just over a month for Ken to translate Roberta's hand-written game concept into the first graphic/text adventure, The Wizard and the Princess. Available for the Apple II, it took full advantage of that machine's high-res capability.

Much of the distribution of Wizard was done by the Williams themselves. The home computer industry was in its infancy, so the first sales were done to individual customers and small computer hobby shops. Demand soon grew, fueled mainly by the popularity of the Apple II. Within a year, the Williams moved the company to Oakhurst, California and adopted the Sierra On-Line as the name for the new business. By the end of 1981, The Wizard and the Princess had sold over sixty-thousand copies.

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King's Quest: The First 3-D Animated Adventure

In 1983, IBM approached Sierra to develop a game that would showcase the new IBM PCjr. This "top secret" partnership produced the legendary Kings Quest. For the first time gamers controlled an on-screen character that interacted with a color, three dimensional environment.

Kings Quest I: Quest for the Crown is the tale of Sir Graham and his quest for three magical treasures that must be returned to the magical Kingdom of Daventry. The success of the original King's Quest (subsequently ported to other platforms) spurred them into creating numerous adventure game series based on the Quest theme. In the years to come Sierra would remain on the forefront of groundbreaking computer game design, sometimes creating large blockbusters and other times, failed experiments. Sierra openly stated that their main rival is television and that their aim is to rescue young people from couch potato-ism.

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1990s

Starting in 1990, Sierra began acquiring other companies, including Dynamix (1990), Bright Star Technologies (1992), Coktel Vision (1993) and Impressions Games (1995). Further acquisitions included Green Thumb Software (1995), Arion Software (1995), Papyrus Design Group (1995), Berkeley Systems (1997), Books That Work (1997), PyroTechnix (1997) and Headgate (1997). Sierra also acquired the rights to use Print Artist, a computer publishing program which allowed users to make high quality picture prints, in 1995.

In 1991 Sierra started an online service called The Sierra Network. Pre-WWW, it was comparable to services like CompuServe or Prodigy except that its interface was completely graphical. Thematically, it was a cross between a kingdom and a theme park in which users could visit different "lands" to post on message boards, exchange emails and play games. It was renamed ImagiNation Network and sold in 1994 to AT&T, who sold it to AOL in 1996.

In 1994, Sierra moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington to attract more talent.

In July 1996, the company was sold to CUC International; Ken Williams left Sierra one year later. In December 1997, CUC merged with HFS Incorporated to form Cendant Corporation. In April 1998, Cendant disclosed that CUC had falsified its books over the past decade, inflating its purported worth before the merger by over US$500 million. The president of CUC, Kirk Shelton, was subsequently convicted of 14 counts of fraud and related charges, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and fined US$3.27 billion; and the criminal trial of the CEO of CUC, Walter Forbes, is still underway as of October, 2005. Forbes had been on Sierra's board of directors and had suggested the CUC purchase in the first place.

Following disclosure of the fraud, Cendant's stock price dropped from $39 to $20, resulting in a loss of about $14 billion of its market capitalization in a single day.

After this shock, Sierra and Cendant's other game studios, including Blizzard Entertainment, were sold again to French publisher Havas, who in turn were acquired by French giant Vivendi.

In 1998, the company was reorganized into five distinct groups:

  1. Sierra Attractions--This division would develop such series as "Hoyle", "You Don't Know Jack" and others.
  2. Sierra Home--This division would publish consumer friendly home improvement programs such as "Print Artist", "Hallmark Card Studios", "MasterCook series", etc.
  3. Sierra Sports--This division would function to publish sports entertainment series developed by Papyrus Design Group and other studios.
  4. Sierra Studios--This division developed the "big" games such as "King's Quest" and also would be used to publish Sierra's games. The division's main offices were in Bellevue and development groups at Impressions Software and PyroTechnix. It would also be the publisher of independent developers.
  5. Dynamix, a Sierra Company--The same company which was purchased in 1990 specialized in developing 3D combat simulation games such as "Red Baron", "Starsiege" and "Pro Pilot", flight simulator game series.

Sierra's location in Oakhurst was renamed Yosemite Entertainment in 1998.

On February 22, 1999, a decision within Sierra resulted in the shutdown of many Sierra development studios. Most shocking was the closing of Yosemite Entertainment. This day would later come to be known by Sierra fans as "Black Monday," or "Chainsaw Monday". The shutdown came with Sierra's announcement of a major reorganization of the company. Other development groups within Sierra such as PyroTechnix, Books That Work Inc., and Synergistic were shut down that fateful day. About 135 people were laid off because of these changes.

Another reorganization of divisions within Sierra came in 1999, this time to "Core Games" (Sierra Studios), Sierra Sports (Sierra Attractions), and Casual Entertainment (Sierra Home). 105 more employees were laid off as a result. Around this time, Sierra also changed from being a major developer of computer games to being a major publisher of games (for independent companies).

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2000s

The company was renamed Sierra Entertainment in 2002.

In June 2004, Vivendi reorganized the Vivendi Universal games group, distributing Sierra's work to other units and finally shutting down Sierra's Bellevue location in August. The Sierra brand now lives on in name only.

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Trivia

  • An independent group known as AGD Interactive have also remade and updated several of Sierra's classic adventure games from the 1980s and 1990s.
  • Another group, Hero6 was originally formed as a direct result to the cancellation of the Quest for Glory series of games. Hero6 is acknowledged as being the first fan-based game group.
  • In the late 1990s, many Sierra games had a rather serious bug. If one were to uninstall a game, the uninstaller would delete an important DLL needed for Windows to work properly.
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Sierra's breakthroughs

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Companies under the Sierra umbrella

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Fully owned subsidiaries of Sierra

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Developers whose games Sierra has published

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Sierra's games

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Adventure games

  • Space Quest series
    1. Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter (1986, improved version 1990)
    2. Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge (1987)
    3. Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon (1989)
    4. Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991)
    5. Space Quest V: Roger Wilco in the Next Mutation (1993)
    6. Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier (1995)
  • Leisure Suit Larry series
    1. Softporn Adventure (1981, precursor to Leisure Suit Larry)
    2. Leisure Suit Larry In the Land of the Lounge Lizards / Leisure Suit Larry 1 (1987, improved version in 1991)
    3. Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places) / Leisure Suit Larry 2 (1988)
    4. Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals (1989)
    5. Leisure Suit Larry 4 (unwritten, unreleased - number skipped as a gag)
    6. Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (1991)
    7. Laffer Utilities (1992)
    8. Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (1993)
    9. Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail (1995)
    10. Leisure Suit Larry's Casino (1998) (a non-adventure Vegas-style spinoff game)
    11. Leisure Suit Larry 8: Lust in Space (unreleased)
    12. Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004), not by Al Lowe
  • Police Quest series
    1. Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (1987, improved version in 1991)
    2. Police Quest II: The Vengeance (1988)
    3. Police Quest III: The Kindred (1990)
    4. Police Quest IV: Open Season (1993)
  • Manhunter series
    1. Manhunter: New York (1988)
    2. Manhunter 2: San Francisco (1989)
  • EcoQuest series
    1. EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus (1991)
    2. EcoQuest 2: Lost Secret of the Rainforest (1993)
  • Gabriel Knight series
    1. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)
    2. Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within (1995)
    3. Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (1999)
  • Phantasmagoria series
    1. Phantasmagoria (1995)
    2. Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996)
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Other notable games

  • 3-D Ultra Pinball series
    1. 3-D Ultra Pinball (1996)
    2. 3-D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night (1996)
    3. 3-D Ultra Pinball: The Lost Continent (1998)
    4. 3-D Ultra Pinball: Thrill Ride (2000)
  • Dr. Brain series
    1. Castle of Dr. Brain (1991)
    2. Island of Dr. Brain (1992)
    3. The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain (1995)
    4. The Time Warp of Dr. Brain (1996)
    5. Dr. Brain Thinking Games: Puzzle Madness (1998)
  • The Incredible Machine series (developed by Dynamix)
    1. The Incredible Machine (1992)
    2. The Even More Incredible Machine (1993)
    3. Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (1993)
    4. The Incredible Machine 2 (1994)
    5. The Incredible Toon Machine (1994)
    6. The Incredible Machine 3.0 (1995)
    7. Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions (2000)
    8. The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions (2001)
  • Field & Stream series
    1. Field & Stream: Trophy Bass 3D
    2. Field & Stream: Trophy Bass 4
    3. Field & Stream: Trophy Buck 'n Bass 2
    4. Field & Stream: Trophy Hunting 4
    5. Field & Stream: Trophy Hunting 5
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References

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External links

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